Neurosurgeon removed part of young black boys' brains to cure 'disruptive behavior'
The neurosurgeon was Dr Orlando Andy at the U of Mississippi. The boys were pretty young. There seems to have little medical rationale for the proceedure.
From what I could gather, it was an attempt to see if boys' disruptive behavior could be lessened if part of their brains were removed
Information is from an interview of Harriet Washington about her book Medical Apartheid that was conducted at Democracy Now 2007 (transcript online)
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for these expensive operations wasn't exactly concentrated on fixing little black boys. 
Jails, asylums, "behavior modification" by police, and of course just complete neglect were far more common answers to their problems.
People were desperate for a treatment that would help when all else had failed, and primitive psychosurgery was extremely popular for a long time, performed around the planet. The medical profession itself was first to put an end to most of it because, after decades of "advances," it was considered too experimental and unreliable to be performed even on consenting patients desperate for it. But I've read the development of better drugs enabled/encouraged mostly abandoning surgery, dreadfully flawed as it was.
Btw, with enormous advances in knowledge and technology, and due to the tragic inadequacy of other treatments in so many, surgery for the purpose of altering mental function has been back for a while.
